Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Unofficial Apple Icon Design Awards for 2015. We will be celebrating the best in class minimalist icon design the community has to offer. This has been an especially tough year, with lots of competition.

I did some sleuthing over the weekend and found an interesting development in filmmaker Mel Brooks' views on criticism. At first, in The Critic (1962), which I've explored previously, Brooks envisioned the critic as an everyman, sticking it to elitist pretension with an unwavering honesty few else were brave enough to muster.

Over the past several months, there has been a surprising resurgence of interest in user interface aesthetics. For a short moment, a particular subset of UI designers paid attention to something besides prototyping tools, flat UI colors and the latest design "disruption."

About a week ago I sat down to watch a recording of Mule Design's Mike Monteiro speaking at the Webdagene conference. His talk began with some brave and incisive criticisms of the failures of both academic design programs and the design industry proper. But as the talk drew on, Monteiro built himself up into a righteous fury.

This week I'd like to share a personal favorite: the Academy Award Winning animation, "The Critic," by Mel Brooks and Ernest Pintoff. The short film was based on an experience Brooks had in the spring of 1962.

It has now been more than two years since WWDC 2013 when iOS 7's flattened and utterly illegible software keyboard first saw the light of day. Upon its initial release, the keyboard's visual design was the least of the design community's concern. If anything, it was and still remains to this day the embodiment of modern minimalist virtue.

In this interview with James Gill, CEO of GoSquared, we discuss how GoSquared went from its early days as a small advertising platform to what it is today, a design-centric, real-time web analytics platform. The following is the transcript of our conversation. Enjoy!

Offscreen Magazine's twelfth issue has just arrived. In this issue, Offscreen's Kai Brach and Ivana McConnell reached out to ask what the next decade holds for me and my thoughts on what is in store for the industry more broadly. Pick up a copy to find out!

Although it went unnamed for years, the phenomenon of the tweetstorm has long been practiced among Twitter power users. As the popularity of the tweetstorm has risen, many seem to have a misconception about what exactly a tweetstorm is. After the Spotify branding scandal that erupted on Twitter a several weeks ago, The Next Web posted a story in which the term was incorrectly described as follows: "What sounds like a small change ended up in a relatively huge tweet storm with thousands of people sharing their hate." A tweetstorm is not in fact a deluge of tweets, so what exactly is it and how did it emerge?

The art of icon design is steadily being lost with each passing year. In the spirit of reinvigorating interest in the practice, I have compiled a selection of some of the great speed icon design process videos that designers have published over the years. You'll see everything from crisp vector work to textured digital painting and raster techniques.